HP announces it’s open-sourcing webOS

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There has been an interesting turn of events today in the ongoing webOS saga. Newly installed HP CEO Meg Whitman announced via press release that her company had made the decision to make the mobile operating system open source, essentially giving the code away for anyone to work on.

Like a twist in a bad daytime soap, no one saw this coming. The move can be taken as the ultimate altruistic action from an executive that wants to make a splash, or as indication that HP didn’t know what else to do with it. The fact is, the reason behind the move is a little bit of both.

It’s no secret that HP has been in trouble for some time. The recent firing of Leo Apotheker was partly because of the fact that the world’s largest computer manufacturer had been hemorrhaging money due to its acquisition of Palm, and the failed efforts to sell hardware-based on webOS. The TouchPad was a colossal failure resulting in the recent fire sales of the tablet, as well as the fact that none of the phones being offered by HP were moving very well. This resulted in four straight quarters of HP downgrading its profit outlooks, as well as losing almost 40% of its stock value. Add to that the announcement that HP was going to cease production of computers and you get a lot of market confusion and consumer dissatisfaction.

Enter Meg Whitman, striding into the path of the whirlwind to assess the damage done to the company she took over. If you think that her first move was not to shop webOS around to potential buyers, you are deluding yourself. If you are on a sinking boat, and there is dead weight on the deck, that’s the first thing going overboard. Whitman and the board most assuredly took steps to evaluate the worth of the defunct division, then looked to potential suitors. Obviously there were no takers and with HP’s inability — or unwillingness — to create a new piece of hardware to prop up the investment made in the OS there weren’t many other options. This is where Whitman saw her opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.

Releasing the code to the developer community is the best move HP could have made. The company garners good will from consumers when they hear that a corporation is just giving something away, and HP gains a user base of experienced developers that are going to crowd source webOS into what it should have been in the first place. This move is, in some ways, a classic win-win. That noted, the press release had no mention of any webOS-based hardware efforts by HP, though this announcement means that other manufacturers would be open to working with it.

It will be interesting to see where webOS goes from here, will it compete with the likes of Android and iOS? Not likely, but it could make a run. This will, at least, ensure that webOS lives on.

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